Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote: I appreciate all the work various folks have done to move Linux along. I have used Linux since about kernel 0.99. Now for me at least Linux has become my daily OS. (I used to use OS/2 daily and Linux as my secondary OS.) Many Thanks to All! I also understand the capitalist elements you detail. I am not a hard core (meaning religious or fanatical) open source advocate. Open source just makes good sense. I could go into the various reasons why, but I won't and it's probably obvious to anyone on this list anyway. I am a quite hardcore open source advocate, although I do not classify myself as religious or fanatical though. One of the differences that separate me from some other advocates however, is that I understand some of the capitalistic elements very well that arise such as this one we've been discussing, and I am able to put myself into a neutral mind state, and look at the open source angle, and express my desires to have all hardware specifications available and as much open source code as possible, as well as understanding the corporate angle of the vendor, and why their decisions are chosen for what is best or perceived to be the best for their own likelyhood. Even if I very strongly desire to see something open sourced, I realize if the other party can not legally do something, or does not see the benefit of doing so, to *THEM* in their *OWN* eyes for reasons they *CARE* about for their financial success, and other factors important to *THEM*, then it stands to reason they wont do it. Would you? In fact, doing something like that might even get them in trouble with the SEC, and they'd most surely have to inform stockholders via SEC reports of the risks they'd be taking by open sourcing their stuff (assuming they legally could, which is almost certainly not true). More likely than not, a day later their stock would plummet and their competitor's stock would raise. I wish some sort of compromise could be reached where the proprietary never-to-be-open-sourced bits could be made to coexist with the open bits in a timely manner. Matrox does this for some of their stuff via hallib. It does not however do everything that the other full proprietary drivers from other vendors do though, and the Matrox hallib does not make the mga driver comparable to their Windows driver offerings. It just improves the support of mode setup, adds dualhead on G400, and makes TVout work among a few other things. One thing that *could* be done which would be beneficial to OSS users, would be to have the large GPU engine removed from the kernel and done in userland, with a fast method of communicating to the hardware. That is completely possible in theory, and it would be great to see happen sometime. Not likely to happen until it is considered something financially worthy of spending the resources on though. What I mean is that I don't like waiting for months and months for various hardware and features to be supported by Linux. I don't mean just with Xfree, but with other parts of Linux as well, like media players and so forth. (My goal is never to have to boot Windows for anything.) I don't know what a workable solution from a technology aspect would be. Perhaps some consistent pluggable module API or library scheme? Who likes waiting for anything? Everyone would like hardware to be supported with equal or better attention spent developing Linux/OSS support as is paid to Windows. I just isn't realistic however to expect a corporation to spend 50% of their development time supporting an OS that generates 1% of their revenue (or 0.01% or whatever). If anything, I would guess that many hardware vendors _already_ spend more percentage of resources on Linux development than they see percentagewise return of revenue for doing so. Of course that is likely true for some types of hardware and probably totally false for other types of hardware. I also have no statistics to back up this opinion, and I very well could be very wrong. I'll also likely change my opinion in 12 months, and then again every 4 to 6 months after that, as Linux's mainstream desktop usage curve increases. BTW, XFree86 has a module API ;o) -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Dan wrote: We get what the lawyers say we can have basically, and we should be glad to get that, especially if the alternative is nothing. From an end-user's point of view, this argument doesn't cut it. It doesn't have to cut it. If a product does not do what you do not want it to do or expect it to do, or if a company/vendor/whatever does not provide or support a product which meets your personal needs or work the way you require or expect, then it is simple. Repeat after me: Do not purchase the product that does not meet your needs. The fact that ATI have contributed code for a 2D driver doesn't move me. In fact I don't even use the 2D driver - the only time I run X with my Radeon I use the VESA driver for it, as it's the only way I can get tv-out working in X, but admittedly that's only when I leave my girlfriend with the computer and she wants a gui interface to mplayer with tv-out. I don't think that the product you are using was designed, developed, marketed, supported, or advertised for the purpose that you are trying to use it for however, as much as you may or may not want to use it for that purpose. You may be upset by that, but really. Purchase the right tool for the right job, and in some cases that might very well mean that you can't use OSS to solve the job at hand. Sure Quake works, and xscreensaver and the xmms plugins. Cool. But a majority of the games I have don't work: Tribes 2 ( crashes on startup ), Unreal Tournament 2003 ( previously required S3 Texture Compression, I feel pretty confident to say that none of the video hardware companies which either support XFree86/OSS with open and/or close source drivers are doing so for the Linux video gaming market. Video gaming in Linux is a cool thing for Linux enthusiasts such as yourself, and for myself, however it is not something which is driving the production of video drivers. If any of the numerous video hardware vendors out there reading this are in fact specifically targeting their drivers to the Linux gamers out there, please speak up. I have a feeling I'll see a vow of silence on this one. The drivers are produced for high end CAD and 3D animation and scientific usage such as geological exploration, and medical. They are thrown over the fence more unsupported and more or less as-is to the unwashed masses (of which I consider myself as well for the purpose of this statement) in hopes that if other people get them to work with whatever software they use, great. I would be surpised, no, shocked to find out that the production of Linux video drivers is *aimed* at improving their corporate financial bottom line, by selling hardware to Linux gamers or home enthusiasts. now has far too many rendering bugs to be able to tell what's going on) , Neverwinter Nights ( runs at 1 frame every 5 seconds - and yes I have DRI working ). Most likely, the scientific, medical and 3D animation customers that the drivers were written and are maintained for have not encountered these problems in the 3D software that they use for business purposes. While I certainly don't just sit here playing games all day, I bought my Radeon for 2 reasons, and 2D support wasn't one of them - $AUS 500 is too much for just 2D support. I wanted 3D acceleration, and multimedia ( tv in out ). Of these, 3D acceleration doesn't work with my games, tv-out kinda-just-barely works on the console ( but I assume someone will eventually 'fix' this so it doesn't work at all ) and tv-in I believe works, ( but not if compiled with gcc-3.x. - I suppose this is fair enough ). You purchased hardware that has drivers that were not developed and are not _supported_ for the purposes that you wish to use them for. You are very much in a position of caveat emptor. If ATI have provided more documentation than all other hardware vendors combined then that is an interesting statistic, but it doesn't address the above end-user issues. However I have read a number of threads in the Gatos mailing list about ATI not even responding to requests for documentation for the newer Rage Theatre chips for the past *year*. And ATI is the market leader for that kind of hardware functionality. I presume they don't want all of their competitors to have similar functionality in their next generation video hardware. Responding with a reason why the documentation is not available would be something. Yes, it would be something that the community would use to start a never ending thread to counteract whatever the reasons are. More likely than not it is a case of it's better to not say anything at all, than to try and be honest and explain your position and then have people attack you endlessly with more ferocity than they'd have done had you not said anything. I encounter this all the time. If someone asks me Why does your product version x.y not support foo? and I delete their mail, they are none the wiser.
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On 18 Jul 2003, William Suetholz wrote: The binary ones, or the open source ones? Either way, your question isn't very clear. What's the deal doesn't mean a lot. I am not aware of any open source drivers directly available from ATI. That is because ATI contributes their open source code directly to the XFree86 project. There is no separate open source ATI driver project, it is _part_ of XFree86 to start with. Just look at the XFree86 changelogs for any credits mentioning (ATI), (Hui Yu), (Alexander Stohr), or other ATI employees. Usually the credits are logged as ATI or Hui. The patches that are submitted are non-trivial, and without them the open source ATI Radeon driver wouldn't support half of the hardware it does, nor a lot of the functionality. are unsupported - just like any company's drivers are unsupported on any OS platform. (Try calling any video hardware vendor on the telephone for *any* operating system, including Microsoft Windows and tell them your video card is crashing and you think it is a driver bug. Watch how fast every vendor out there will tell you that they do not provide end user support.) Not entirely true.. I have gotten support from ATI in getting their stuff to work under NT and other MS systems. I'll consider that an exception to the rule. The majority of people I know who have ever called any video hardware vendor for anything have been told we do not provide end user technical support for our products, sorry or something to that effect. If your call was of a business nature, or you are a higher end customer, then I would be less surprised though. ;o) everything, open source their proprietary drivers, sell their company and donate the money to the XFree86 project, and people would still find something to bitch thanklessly about and complain about some bug they find. On the other hand.. If more people who didn't want to have to run another OS to access features that are not well supported because of lack of knowledge on how to support them would comment/complain (oh alright -BITCH-) maybe the hardware vendors would realize that there is a viable market for their devices to be used on the second class OS's And, I'm sure that ATI has a file on me :-) I've been commenting on this directly to them for some time. People need to do that to their computer manufacturer really. The major computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM and others. Until *they* start supporting Linux on the home desktop, I very much don't think anything will change. Once they do however, then the IHV's listed above and others will be the ones wanting Linux support, and the volume of sales involved justifies a bottom line to the video hardware vendor to do the work. It has to be commoditized first however in order for it to be considered any kind of priority. IMHO anyway. If I sound like the devil's advocate, I assure you I'm not. I'm just tired of hearing random people bitch and beak off about this type of crap who don't put any sort of thought whatsoever into the business, legal, copyright/trademark/patent, or engineering costs and other factors that affect these types of decisions in companies out there. Try to look at things from the angle of the given company out there for once. Yes I am a random person, and, I'm a nobody who must be a pretty terrible person to want to use something other than a MS supported product to utilize the features that the card was purchased for. And, I must never (in the 5-7 years I've been asking for this) have thought about the business side of things. There is a big difference between wanting something and realizing the realities of why a vendor wont provide it to you. *I* want support equal or greater to that which you would like to see. I would love to see it more than anything, with a VERY strong preference to open source. I'm not _personally_ interested in proprietary drivers, but I know others out there aren't biased one way or another and just want something that in their minds works. But I know it wont happen until there is a visible and measureable money stream on some financial chart on a suit's desk that shows that supporting Linux affects the corporate bottom line for $COMPANY. I can understand and relate to that, despite wanting to see as much Linux support as possible. I would actually be satisfied with Binary only drivers that would support the whole card. But, there aren't enough people letting them know that there is an interest (OOPS that would be BITCHING!). Perhaps the problem is that people are writing directly to the video hardware vendor, and perhaps the majority are doing so with angry emails and phone calls or somesuch. Really though, until Dell/HP/IBM/Gateway/whoever start saying video vendor foo, we require video drivers for Linux as we will be supporting the Linux OS and we will use another vendor's video hardware who is
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote: On the other hand.. If more people who didn't want to have to run another OS to access features that are not well supported because of lack of knowledge on how to support them would comment/complain (oh alright -BITCH-) maybe the hardware vendors would realize that there is a viable market for their devices to be used on the second class OS's The reality of the business end of this is just brutal. The unfortunate fact is that your viable market is completely insignificant. ATI doesn't make money from you. ATI doesn't make money from the few tens of thousands of Linux users out there. At their margins, that probably pays for part of one engineer's salary. No, ATI makes money when IBM orders 2 million Rage chips for their next generation laptop. If IBM made the deal conditional on ATI providing high- quality, high-functionality XFree86 drivers, you can bet they would trip over their shoelaces in providing that. However, they don't. IBM makes the deal conditional on great WinXP drivers and great DX9 support, because to 3 standard deviations, that's what its customers want. In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. I would actually be satisfied with Binary only drivers that would support the whole card. But, there aren't enough people letting them know that there is an interest (OOPS that would be BITCHING!). And even if EVERY person let them kinow there was an interest, it still wouldn't be enough. There just aren't enough of us. Sigh... Once again you say more or less in about 10 sentences what I am thinking and trying to relay in 300 sentences. Are you for hire or what? ;o) -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: No, ATI makes money when IBM orders 2 million Rage chips for their next generation laptop. If IBM made the deal conditional on ATI providing high- quality, high-functionality XFree86 drivers, you can bet they would trip over their shoelaces in providing that. However, they don't. IBM makes the deal conditional on great WinXP drivers and great DX9 support, because to 3 standard deviations, that's what its customers want. In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. I've been trying to tell pretty much every person who comes to me talking about _any_ company's proprietary video hardware drivers, that those drivers were not written for fun, nor for gaming. They were written for high end 3D customers such as the movie industry, scientific, geological, medical, etc. However, some people are brainlocked to think that the drivers are written for video gaming in Linux. Nobody wants to believe that there has to be a business case for this stuff to exist for some reason, and just thinks companies write drivers like the Nvidia, ATI, and other drivers and provide them for download for video gaming or charity or something. With your permission, I'd like to be able to forward your email to people in the future, to help them understand this right from the horse's mouth so to speak. And if so, I thank you very much. ;o) Ironically, the Linux desktop community doesn't target the only potential business case there is. It's often at odds with it. Workstation users like a platform that doesn't change and anything that risks damaging OpenGL behavior (like RandR support or alpha blended cursors) is generally not well accepted. Indeed. With new features getting added each release, it's hard to both progress toward the current technology trend and also sustain a stable supportable platform, while also supporting the latest video hardware. To stick with an older XFree86 release for example, means you might not get the latest features, but your X server does not change drastically every n months. However, then when a new video card comes out and you need to use it, you have no choice but to upgrade to a new XFree86 release. I see this very problem very often, and it's not easily solveable IMHO, because you've got the needs of the end user, the needs of the OS vendor, the needs of the driver developer/provider and the needs of the X11 implementation project all conflicting to a certain extent (while overlapping in others). I believe however that it is possible to increase the overlapping of needs in the mid to long run, and minimize the amount of conflicting needs, but it will take time to get there. As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example. Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources are best allocated to another project. That backs up what I've been trying to say the last 3-4 messages very well, only again with less verbiage than I, and with more numerical information. ;o) I think I can just about shut the F up soon now. Thanks. ;o) Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote: For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. Search google for Dreamworks SKG stories involving Linux. You'll be surprised. -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Daniel Stone wrote: No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they would sell more boards. Not very many, and their competitirs would then have access to all their IP, so could out-do them in the next generation of cards. I doubt that it would involve hardware as much as it would involve the driver aspect and the JIT compiler for the GPU perhaps. Having never seen the complete source code of any modern proprietary full featured video driver however, it's very hard to say. -- Mike A. Harris ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 14:30, Dan wrote: Sure Quake works, and xscreensaver and the xmms plugins. Cool. But a majority of the games I have don't work: Tribes 2 ( crashes on startup ), Unreal Tournament 2003 ( previously required S3 Texture Compression, now has far too many rendering bugs to be able to tell what's going on) , Neverwinter Nights ( runs at 1 frame every 5 seconds - and yes I have DRI working ). FWIW, most if not all of these problems have been fixed or are being worked on in DRI CVS. Watch the dri-devel and dri-patches lists. -- Earthling Michel Dänzer \ Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer Software libre enthusiast \ http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: [Pfaedit-devel] Re: [forum] Re: Choosing an extension for bitmap-only SFNTs
GW Ok, I'm currently posting a new build of PfaEdit which will generate GW embedded bitmap opentype fonts with extension .otb Considering the lack of serious objection to .otb, I consider it adopted. GW (PfaEdit is currently generating 'OTTO', which is appropriate for GW opentype fonts). I'm simply using the TrueType 1.0 signature. Windows refuses these fonts anyway. Juliusz ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: a small twm/Imakefile patch
Marc Aurele La France [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: http://www.alexander-pohoyda.privat.t-online.de/patches/twm.Imakefile.diff Updated. Can you elaborate on why is it useful to switch from single quote quoting to backslashes? It may be not useful as much, but with an old version we end up calling a command: [...] cc -c [...] -DHAS_MKSTEMP '-DSYSTEM_INIT_FILE='/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/twm'/system.twmrc' parse.c which is not consistent, does not look very nice and requires more processing by the shell. ... but is still required for portability reasons. Oh! Good to know. Thanks. May I also ask on which system/shell/compiler/imake would my patch fail? Just for the record. With your change, on IRIX, I get: [aurora:/scratch_large/root/X11/alpha/loader/xc/programs] make SUBDIRS=twm Makefiles making Makefiles in programs/twm... mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak cc-1018 cc: ERROR at end of source An unmatched left parentheses ( appears in an expression. Would you please try if it works on IRIX this way: -SpecialCObjectRule(parse,$(_NOOP_),'-DSYSTEM_INIT_FILE='$(TWMDIR)'/system.twmrc') +SpecialCObjectRule(parse,$(_NOOP_),'-DSYSTEM_INIT_FILE=$(TWMDIR)/system.twmrc') It's not about commiting this senseless patch, of course :-) Thank you very much! -- Alexander Pohoyda [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 03:10:14AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: ...snip... More likely than not it is a case of it's better to not say anything at all, than to try and be honest and explain your position and then have people attack you endlessly with more ferocity than they'd have done had you not said anything. I encounter this all the time. If someone asks me Why does your product version x.y not support foo? and I delete their mail, they are none the wiser. They are unlikely to flame me, or to even know if I got it. I will add my own Rant here. Ignoring email from Joe Public who bought his 'Puter from Walmart' might work, but I feel 'Dissed' when a person insults my intelligence with this respose. Worse, you waste your time doing so, and your company time. Should these companies hire 50 people to respond to all of these emails to listen to users argue with them? No. Hit delete, and let it go. The user may be upset for not getting a response, but they're going to more often be a lot less upset than hearing the truth and wanting to argue with you and waste a lot of your time doing so. Also, your company is paying for your time, so if you're responding to 5000 users a day to listen to them argue, that is hardly worthy usage of your time. Fortunately, it is Saturday, so I can argue with you until Monday. After that, I'll have to delete your mails. ;o) My threshold was 300-500 daily emails. Less than 300 was a light day, and more than 500 kept me from finishing the work I was paid to do. I have no idea what your data point looks like but I suspect you use multiple addresses and understand how to sort things into various folders. I rarely respond and spend 10X to 20X more time reading than writing email. I would write more code if I did not get as much email but the spammers make that unlikely :( If you cannot or choose to not respond, that is fine. But own up to your decision and do not pretend you never received the message. Richard ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Mike A. Harris wrote: On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Daniel Stone wrote: No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they would sell more boards. Not very many, and their competitirs would then have access to all their IP, so could out-do them in the next generation of cards. I doubt that it would involve hardware as much as it would involve the driver aspect and the JIT compiler for the GPU perhaps. Having never seen the complete source code of any modern proprietary full featured video driver however, it's very hard to say. Drivers show hardware limitations and workarounds for hardware bugs. If your competitors know where your bugs and performance bottlenecks are, they will use that to their advantage. Their developer relations and marketing will try to get these features into benchmarks and games so that your hardware looks bad. That's not being overly paranoid. That's the way it works. The goal of every vendor is to have a benchmark make their product look good and their competitor's look bad. The competition in this business is really ugly. I'm positive that any graphics hardware vendor that released source to all their graphics drivers would be out of business pretty quickly. The first big blow would come from their competitors, then the stockholder lawsuits would finish them off. The only way they can release any source code at all is to make sure that it's free of sensitive information, which is too much work to do on any large scale. It's not likely to even be considered since there's no tangible benefit to it in the first place. Mark. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 06:09:44PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: | |As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example. | Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and | revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of | over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody | including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a | Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work | is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars | of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources | are best allocated to another project. This is a good rule-of-thumb that everyone should keep in mind. Thanks for presenting it so clearly. It's important not to drive it too far, though. In particular, it's simplified in at least two respects: Opportunity. It may be that there *aren't* any million-dollar per-employee revenue opportunities available in the market. If you want to expand, you have to take the best of the opportunities that are available, even if that means revenue-per-employee goes down. Financials. It takes time for engineering work to be done, and more time for a new market to be developed. So the whole effort needs to be evaluated as an investment with return over time, not just cash-flow-in vs. cash-flow-out. The open source community needs to address this stuff, too, if it wants to make a compelling business case to the vendors. Allen ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Allen Akin wrote: On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 06:09:44PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: | |As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example. | Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and | revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of | over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody | including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a | Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work | is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars | of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources | are best allocated to another project. This is a good rule-of-thumb that everyone should keep in mind. Thanks for presenting it so clearly. It's important not to drive it too far, though. In particular, it's simplified in at least two respects: Opportunity. It may be that there *aren't* any million-dollar per-employee revenue opportunities available in the market. If you want to expand, you have to take the best of the opportunities that are available, even if that means revenue-per-employee goes down. Correct, however, graphics hardware companies have alot of tangential markets they can go into that hold large revenue potential. For example, when NVIDIA needed to grow, it didn't try to collect crumbs with software opportunities for existing hardware. It got into the core logic business with nForce, entering itself in a whole new market. If I look at the emerging opportunities for graphics devices: new markets in settop, palmtop, cell phones, consoles and other appliances, I get the feeling that there are so many markets left untapped, yet not enough resources to devote to them all. I don't expect the current graphics hardware companies to ever be in a position where they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for revenue. Financials. It takes time for engineering work to be done, and more time for a new market to be developed. So the whole effort needs to be evaluated as an investment with return over time, not just cash-flow-in vs. cash-flow-out. The open source community needs to address this stuff, too, if it wants to make a compelling business case to the vendors. Another thing to keep in mind is that users shifting from Windows to Linux is not creation of a new market per se. The total hardware revenue does not increase. It merely creates more work for the vendors as users shift from one platform to another, and prevents vendors from being able to focus on one platform. Hardware vendors have little incentive to encourage this change. They actually have reason to resist it. The case of professional OpenGL workstations I cited earlier was an exception. This was a migration from traditional Unix workstation hardware to Linux PCs. It was a new revenue opportunity for PC graphics hardware vendors. Mark. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
Sorry I interrupt but I wonder why the government does not see (want to see) that Microsoft in effect is completely blocking the market. Because of its market size no development into anything new can be performed if it does not run on windows and since that market is very large, companies do not see need or opportunity to go into other markets EXCEPT if the windows market is lost and/or full. W On Monday 21 July 2003 01:15, Mark Vojkovich wrote: On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Allen Akin wrote: On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 06:09:44PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: |As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example. | Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and | revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of | over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody | including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a | Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work | is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars | of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources | are best allocated to another project. This is a good rule-of-thumb that everyone should keep in mind. Thanks for presenting it so clearly. It's important not to drive it too far, though. In particular, it's simplified in at least two respects: Opportunity. It may be that there *aren't* any million-dollar per-employee revenue opportunities available in the market. If you want to expand, you have to take the best of the opportunities that are available, even if that means revenue-per-employee goes down. Correct, however, graphics hardware companies have alot of tangential markets they can go into that hold large revenue potential. For example, when NVIDIA needed to grow, it didn't try to collect crumbs with software opportunities for existing hardware. It got into the core logic business with nForce, entering itself in a whole new market. If I look at the emerging opportunities for graphics devices: new markets in settop, palmtop, cell phones, consoles and other appliances, I get the feeling that there are so many markets left untapped, yet not enough resources to devote to them all. I don't expect the current graphics hardware companies to ever be in a position where they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for revenue. Financials. It takes time for engineering work to be done, and more time for a new market to be developed. So the whole effort needs to be evaluated as an investment with return over time, not just cash-flow-in vs. cash-flow-out. The open source community needs to address this stuff, too, if it wants to make a compelling business case to the vendors. Another thing to keep in mind is that users shifting from Windows to Linux is not creation of a new market per se. The total hardware revenue does not increase. It merely creates more work for the vendors as users shift from one platform to another, and prevents vendors from being able to focus on one platform. Hardware vendors have little incentive to encourage this change. They actually have reason to resist it. The case of professional OpenGL workstations I cited earlier was an exception. This was a migration from traditional Unix workstation hardware to Linux PCs. It was a new revenue opportunity for PC graphics hardware vendors. Mark. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
